User blog:Angel Emfrbl/Good/bad things so far...
A list of things the companies did right; Good (ideas I felt had purpose or were itneresting with good potential results - even if they didn't do well); *Updating V1 -> V3 vocals (Crypton Future Media), the ancient V1 engine did not give "fair" results for the V1 vocals and had been abandoned on top of this by Yamaha. *Updating and Adding new things (internet co, Bplats, Crypton Future Media), makes the update more worthwhile in some sense. *Adding extra phonemes but not claiming you can "sell ice to Eskimos and sand to Arabs"; Maika. This is the first time a company has done this approve to language right. They flat out stated that this won't let you do results like a native-built vocal can and this is why I've never had a critique with them over this. Prima and others in the V2 era had "R" as well, so it wasn't new. *Big Al's overhaul; Did PowerFx good. The original Al put too many off so the new one gave more back. *releasing male and female vocals; Several companies have done this, but for some companies they've opted to do two females straight off the bat. Lapis and Merli, ad well as the two Chinese vocaloid, released two females breaking the circle. But... Two females haven't the contrast a male and a female has. So you end up with not much contrast. Females sell, but I prefer it when companies stick to the male and female pair because it means at least the two most obvious and biggest contrasts are fulfilled right away. Plus when you jump into a new language or into the Vocaloid existing market, you don't know which of your products will make it and its nice to have a idea which way to lean to first. Sometimes the "pair" factor means fans buy both to have the complete collection of both vocals. *Competitions; these get the fans involved and make them put the effort into doing something, so long as you give out a reward and don't make a mess while doing this. *Delaying for quality reasons; see VY2. *Breaking the Ice, getting fans to know the company. CFM does it with their Japanese fanbase, Internet does it with theirs. Zero-G and PowerFX at least did this. *Language jumps; Way to introduce more fans into your Vocaloid selling circle, by giving fans something in the language they know. *In it for the penny, in it for the pound; releasing one vocaloid sand expecting it to do well... Over time your company gets loyal fans, so keep releasing new vocaloids lets fans feel they can get to know your vocaloids and invest more into them. And the neglect (ideas I think don't were good or are not at least as interesting); *VY1v3; they updated the vocal but to be fair, it barely notices. Unless you "know" what the difference is, and a lot don't seem to know, it was almost a worthless update. VY1 was also less then 2 years old *Promising too much; SeeU being trilingual and then having only two voicebanks and fragments of "English" *Stating captain obvious; Sonika. Yes you can edit a vocal to make it do other languages, but she had it stated on her page which lead to fans thinking they meant she could do more then she actually could do. This wasn't stupidity, but Zero-G trying to stress English Vocaloids could be expanded upon. I actually don't blame this on Zero-G's bad planning, but I think they were trying to point out that English vocals were expansive compared to Japanese Vocaloids without saying it, as people were doing this with Japanese vocals and often the results were poor. *Adding "cash" to a project name. "Miku-cash" was, and always be, a poor name for Miku English early project. It gives away this is for money and makes your intentions seem worst then they are. We know Miku was being English-fied for the money, there are some things best left unsaid. *Putting the Twaiwan images on your website (PowerFX) without explanation lead to fans getting scared on what was happening. It freaked people out. :-/ *Releasing 3 new vocaloids at once (ah software). Basically, this asked fans and producers to fork out £350+ for 3 new vocals before they had grown to know the company. The vocals felt a bit rushed and needed time. *Rush jobs. The Kagamines, Sonika... *Placing restrictions on demos; Sony and Piko. End of story. Way to make a bad rep with potential fans, but its Sony. On a list of exploitation of their interests, Sony is one of the companies who often gets at the top for their methods. *Hiring a professional singer - before you've got the fandom on your side. This can get ugly and is another issue with SeeU. I guess they were hoping her provider would get uber popualr and it would sell SeeU, but you can also make things backfire by hiring a singer who is expensive and it not working. We've yet to find out how well SeeU did and SBS are dodging ever saying this. Are they embarrassed? *The one release; SeeU, Piko and Ia... Because I feel one vocal is just boring. It feels like the company is releasing for the sake of doing so. Ia's got a new project, but the vocal has too much of what we know so far. Appends can be a little disappointing in that they can offer little. Thats why I prefer language jumps over tone changes. You can edit vocals to get new tones, but you can't edit phonetics enough to make a fully functional new language. Category:Blog posts